Knowledge and Character

Abstract

DR. MAXWELL GARNETT in this book approaches the problems of moral education from the point of view of physiology and experimental psychology. Time was when recourse to scientific method would have meant that the author was committed to a materialistic and determinist interpretation of the mental and moral life. But that is no longer the case. Science has shed almost every trace of a priori dogmatism, and we find Dr. Garnett frankly advocating the hypothesis of interaction between mind and body as the most reasonable explanation of the facts. True, he raises a good many problems of a speculative order which the limits of his space do not permit him to discuss fully. He ranges in the course of his argument over the theory of knowledge and of being, touching also in highly suggestive ways on questions of religion and the ultimate aim of life. We find him speaking of what are strictly psycho-physical generalizations, such as the five formulated in the earlier chapters, and summarized collectively on p. 273, as though they were laws of thought; and a good deal of his physiological theory of neurograms, each of which corresponds with varying complexity to a concomitant mental process, is of the nature of highly inferential construction from data that are strictly psychological. Indeed the concept of correspondence which occurs very frequently in these pages seems to us to stand in need of a good deal of detailed explanation. It may well be questioned whether the method of explaining psychological facts by speculative physiological deductions from the very facts to be explained has sufficient logical validity.

Knowledge and Character

By Dr. Maxwell Garnett. Pp. xii + 358. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1939.) 18s. net.